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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://ipa-aip.org/2026/08/22/against-the-false-symmetry-of-the-scissors-an-open-letter-while-iran-resists-an-illegal-war-of-aggression/?sfnsn=mo">ipa-aip.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Against the False Symmetry of the Scissors: An Open Letter While Iran Resists an Illegal War of Aggression \u2013 IPA</h1>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">August 22, 2026</div>
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<p><strong>Vijay Prashad</strong></p>
<p>Dear friends and colleagues,</p>
<p>The United States and Israel launched a war of aggression against
Iran in February of this year. For six months, US missiles and bombs
have fallen upon civilian and military targets inside the country.
Hospitals, schools, energy facilities, and neighbourhoods have been
struck. The 168 schoolgirls killed in Minab have become the terrible
symbol of this war. Iranians have been forced to live under the constant
expectation of another attack, while Iranian families outside the
country endure the peculiar agony of watching the destruction from afar.
This follows on three years of Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has been
carried out due to the relentless military support of the United
States.</p>
<p>Iran did not begin this war. The United States and Israel did. Iran
is resisting an armed attack upon its territory and its people. That
elementary fact must determine the timing, language, and political
responsibilities of anyone who writes about Iran at this moment.</p>
<p>It is in this context that I read your <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/aug/20/iran-political-prisoners">open letter</a> to Iran\u2019s political prisoners.</p>
<p>Among you are former political prisoners (such as Angela Davis) and a
current political prisoner (Mumia Abu-Jamal). I have stood in agreement
with many of you on most of the great questions of our time. Of course,
there are elements of your letter with which I agree, but I feel that <em>this</em> letter at <em>this </em>time
plays a politically damaging role. Just when the United States and
Israel are on the back foot, this letter can provide the kind of
political confusion that mystifies the actual political dynamic on the
ground: Iran has the strategic advantage, having transformed the
US-Israeli question (should Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons)
into an Iranian <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/11/iran-has-changed-the-question/">question</a>
(should Iran allow commerce through its territorial waters unimpeded).
That provides the background of the Left\u2019s moral clarity, the war of
aggression that has failed and that has put Iran as well as its
neighbours into a discussion about regional security rather than
imperial security.</p>
<p>But this letter, from the Global North, provides the kind of
ideological cover that the US loves: if the US has lost, then let all
sides lose and let all sides be at fault.</p>
<p>The central image, <em>two blades of a scissors</em>, is evocative
but erroneous. It suggests that one of the blades is the Islamic
Republic and the other blade is the United States and Israel, with the
Iranian people being cut by the two of them. The error of the scissors
is not merely that its blades are unequal. It is that the image makes
the aggressor and the attacked appear as parallel sources of the same
danger, stripping away the history and hierarchy that connect them. US
imperialism is not simply one oppression alongside another. It is the
force that has encircled Iran, devastated the region, armed Israel,
imposed sanctions upon an entire population, and now brought war to
Iranian territory. Your letter places the aggression and its target in
the same moral frame.</p>
<p>The United States <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/">maintains</a>
over 900 hundred military installations outside its borders, imposes
sanctions upon entire populations, finances and arms Israel\u2019s genocide
in Gaza, and has destroyed or destabilised country after country. Iran,
whatever criticisms one might make of its political system, has never
launched wars of aggression. The state born from the 1979 Revolution has
not launched wars of conquest, but it has instead endured invasion from
Iraq at the behest of the West, encirclement, sanctions, sabotage,
assassinations, and now direct attack. The two blades are not
equivalent. One is the blade of imperialist war. The other, whatever its
internal contradictions, is the state and society being cut. </p>
<p><strong>Hollowness</strong></p>
<p>The open letter argues that there is a \u2018false binary of imperialism
and hollow anti-imperialism\u2019. I was interested in the use of the
adjective \u2018hollow\u2019.</p>
<p>First, Iran\u2019s actual defence of itself. The assassination of Commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq in 2020 marked a <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/02/28/a-war-that-cannot-be-won-israel-and-the-united-states-bomb-iran/">decisive stage</a>
in the escalation that culminated in the February 2026 illegal attack
on Iran. Soleimani was the architect of Iran\u2019s forward strategy, namely,
to build a defensive shield through pro-Iranian armed groups that would
attack Israel and US military positions from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq,
Yemen, Palestine, and other countries. From 2020, the US and Israel
systematically went after that network by trying to destroy Hamas,
Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and end the use of Damascus as a base for many
of these groups as well as Syria and Iraq as a logistical lifeline from
Iran. Having weakened this shield, the US and Israel felt emboldened to
attack Iran. But they did not calculate that Iran has built a mechanism
to hit the US bases in the Gulf Arab states and that Iran would restrict
access to the Strait of Hormuz.</p>
<p>The use of these mechanisms by Iran put it at a strategic advantage
over the United States and Israel (the latter which has subsequently
receded from the foreground of this war). Iran\u2019s anti-imperialism has
not been \u2018hollow\u2019 at all but has in fact enabled the Iranian people to
protect their country from an imperialist take-over. This is a
significant feat that is being celebrated across the formerly colonised
world as one of the most consequential strategic reversals suffered by
the United States since its defeat in Vietnam in 1975 (the <a href="https://thenewpress.org/books/the-withdrawal/">withdrawals</a> from Afghanistan and Iraq are of a different character than this strategic upper hand by Iran).</p>
<p>Second, in 1979, the Iranian revolutionaries chanted, <em>Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine</em>.
Indeed, despite the crackdown on the Left within Iran in the immediate
aftermath of the revolution and with the formation of the Islamic
Republic, the commitment to Palestine remained firm. Iran has never even
hinted at normalisation with Israel and indeed has been forthright in
its defence of the Palestinian cause. No other country in the region has
been as committed to the Palestinian freedom movement, and none has
paid so high a price for that commitment.</p>
<p>Why have the United States and Israel been obsessed with Iran since
1979? Not because of any question of democracy (Iran has an electoral
political system, although one shaped by the Guardian Council and
limitations on political participation \u2013 just as the democratic claims
of the United States are constrained by oligarchic power, racial
exclusion, and the domination of money). Not even because of any nuclear
threat (the International Atomic Energy Agency has not <a href="https://www.iaea.org/topics/monitoring-and-verification-in-iran">established</a>
that Iran possesses an active nuclear-weapons programme, while Iran\u2019s
leadership has repeatedly declared nuclear weapons religiously
prohibited).</p>
<p>The reason they hate Iran is because it is defiant, and its defiance includes its position for the Palestinian cause.</p>
<p>One can have any view on Iran, of course, but to call its anti-imperialism \u2018hollow\u2019 at this moment is inaccurate.</p>
<p><strong>The US must retreat</strong></p>
<p>The open letter closes with two demands: first that the Iranian state
must \u2018stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now\u2019.
Common opposition to the death penalty, which I share, does not place
the United States and Iran in the same historical or political position,
nor does it justify subordinating the immediate demand that the
aggressor end its war to a general indictment of the country under
attack. During this period of the US illegal war on Iran, the United
States put nineteen people to death by lethal injection, but the letter
says nothing about that (nor about the genocidal treatment of
Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli versions of Guantanamo \u2013 such as
Sde Teiman, about which Wesam Afifa has <a href="https://leftword.com/product/survivors-of-the-darkness/">written</a>
so movingly; the only statement is to say that Iran uses \u2018the same
logic of domination\u2019 as Israel, which is a very strange formulation).
One can oppose the death penalty. One can demand due process and humane
treatment for prisoners. One can listen carefully to Iranian workers,
women, minorities, and political activists. But internal criticism
cannot be detached from the concrete conditions in which it is made.</p>
<p>The second demand of the open letter is that the US and Israel \u2018must
end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate
our communities\u2019. We are in total agreement here. But the letter is not
addressed to the United States but to Iranian prisoners. That is another
curiosity of its formulation. The signatories are mainly US nationals.
Why not write to their own government? The letter devotes most of its
analytical energy to constructing a common carceral logic, while the
demand directed against the imperialist aggressors is compressed into
its final sentence. The formal condemnation of the war does not undo the
political architecture of the letter, which gives parallel status to
the US-Israel war of aggression and the Iranian prison system.</p>
<p>Frantz Fanon taught us that anti-colonial struggles do not unfold
under conditions of their own choosing. States placed under permanent
threat of invasion, sabotage and regime change develop profound internal
contradictions, including security institutions that can turn coercion
against their own people. You ask \u2018global civil society and
anti-imperialist activists and organisations\u2019 to \u2018put pressure on the
Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative\u2019. That is, in sum, asking
the people of the world to take a position that would weaken Iran now
when it is standing tall against the war of aggression. There is a time
to make a demand and there is a time to act in solidarity. This is the
time of solidarity with Iran, and not a time to make a claim that
advantages the aggressor imperialists.</p>
<p>Dear friends, neutrality or a third space does not exist in the midst
of a war of aggression. Would we write such a letter to the Vietnamese
government in Hanoi during the US war of aggression, or to the Cuban
government which is now facing a terrible strangulation by the United
States? Why direct this intervention against Iran at this moment? Why
challenge Iran just when it has the United States and Israel on the back
foot? Is it necessary to ask Iran to become perfect before you defend
its right to survive?</p>
<p>At this hour, solidarity begins with a clear demand: the United
States and Israel must end their illegal war, and they must retreat.</p>
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